The ISO/IEEE11073 (X73) interoperability family of standards was initially conceived for clinical environments at the Point-of-Care (POC). The newest branch of X73, i.e. X73 for Personal Health Devices (X73PHD), allows the development of interoperable personal health ecosystems and brings benefits to both technology producers (design cost reduction, experience sharing, and marketing facilities) and their users (plug-and-play, accessibility, ease of integration, and prices). At the moment of this writing, more than 11 specializations have been successfully published by the PHD Working Group (PHD-WG). Recently, new use cases have been exposed in the PHD-WG, which show the need for a command and control procedure to allow configuring agent’s parameters and settings from the manager. The need to define and model these new management functions in a general and standard way is needed from the PHD-WG standpoint.
In this context, this work presents a proposal to extend X73PHD by including a standardized definition and procedures for general remote command and control services. With this aim, an analysis of previous studies and related cases of use is developed and its results have been studied and discussed within the PHD-WG. The use cases studied include the Intelligent Holter (HOLTIN) service, the Sleep Apnea Breathing Therapy Equipment (SABTE), and the medication monitor. In addition, a classification of the findings is proposed for each use case. These findings are the base for the proposal of the new remote configuration extension package. Previous works such as the classic Domain Information Model (X73-10201) and the POC command and control draft (X73-20301) have also been taken into account. The final solution is defined following the PHD-WG guidelines and a draft version of the new exchange protocol (X73-20601) has been shared with the PHD-WG for discussion. Furthermore, this proposal has been implemented as proof of concept in a basic setup, as standard weigh scale, and an advanced setup, in the highly configurable HOLTIN electrocardiogram recorder. To conclude, the results of the proof-of-concept implementations demonstrate that the proposal is suitable to implement command and control in both use cases and possibly these conclusions can be extended to other PHDs.